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sumane12 t1_j1rw5sm wrote

There's a lot to digest here so I'll start with the basics and get deeper;

  1. cost. The lower price you can make something, the more customers you will have and so the more profit can be made. This is why things tend to come down in price as sellers try to undercut each other. This will happen with AI as well, I'm sure you have heard of stable diffusion?

  2. open source community. GitHub is literally testimony to the fact that no matter how divided we become, a community of like-minded individuals are the best at solving problems. There are some genius individuals that put amazing code on GitHub for free, so let's assume someone develops AGI to keep for themselves, some genius will hack into the network, reverse engineer it and release a freeware version.

  3. the main players seem to want to keep us plebs involved. If you look at deep mind, open AI and stability AI, they all not only want feedback from the general public, but want our options moving forward. They all seem focused on the reason to develop AI is to solve all of humanities problems and in our path towards post scarcity, they all believe some form of ubi will be necessary.

  4. most people are generally good, regardless of whether or not they are billionaires, they want humanity to succeed, as a whole. Obviously this isn't everyone but generally, they want something that is mutually beneficial. If you think about what we have compared to what billionaires have (forget bank balance), it's not that different, when you compare what we have compared to kings and emperor's of the past. The only major difference is waiting for things, billionaires don't have to wait.

  5. what do they gain by denying us access to these technologies? Ultimately if we are in a post scarcity environment, they don't require our cheap labour anymore. This was the strongest determining factor in creating inequality in the past. I think most of us would consider uplifting animals such as gorillas and chimps so for the "elites" to withhold this out of spite... Sorry I just don't see it. Now as I say some people might be like that, but most won't be, and all it takes is 1 person to let the digital cat out of the metaphorical bag

These are just the musings of a crazy optimist, so might in time be proved wrong, but if we look at how quickly people are being pulled out of abject poverty over the past 100 years, it should give us some really good hope for the future.

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